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It’s often said that football has gone soft. However Philip Cornwall, in May 2004, believed the history of the game has been one of taming the back line
As the press pick apart Liverpool's fall from grace, Tottenham and Manchester City's Champions League 'play-off' sparks a punfest in Fleet Street
Liverpool began the season hoping to win a 19th League championship. They ended it with 19 defeats. Rafa Benítez guaranteed supporters a top-four finish, but the club dropped to seventh place in the league, went out of the FA Cup in the third round and faced the ignominy of being knocked out of two European competitions. To put it mildly, the 20th anniversary of their last Championship-winning season has not been their most memorable. Putting it mildly, however, is not one of the charms of British newspapers. If the facts were difficult reading for Benítez, he will have wanted to avoid the back pages.
For Dan Turner, a 1990 FA Cup semi-final was the first staging of a derby against Manchester United in his lifetime and a 3-3 draw still constituted nirvana
“Nick Faldo is on the verge of a second successive US Masters, yesterday we witnessed the fastest-ever Grand National, and this was the day you saw 13 goals in the FA Cup semi-finals” – I can still recall Des Lynam’s super-smooth sign-off on the video I watched as soon as I got home from Maine Road. I wasn’t much fussed about Crystal Palace’s earlier epic 4-3 victory over Liverpool, I just wanted to double-check that my eyes hadn’t been deceiving me for the previous two hours.
It's often said that football has gone soft. However Philip Cornwall not only approves of that but believes the whole history of the game has been one of taming the back line
A brisk walk from The Valley is the home of a rugby side often known simply as Club. But while they are hardly giants of any game now and have never played Charlton Athletic, Blackheath’s role in the history of rugby and also football is a crucial one – had they not stood up for the rights of defenders, who knows what either game would be like today.